ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1mo ago
There is no new information. We have no reason to think his model is even particularly good. The only thing that it really brings to the table is that he both has a consistent reasonable process that doesn't give much room for human bias to creep in, and that he doesn't abandon it the second it makes partisans mad. This is, apparently, a really hard thing to do.
Or, a bit more optimistically: it actually does provide information that can be new to people. E.g., post-debate the model showed that Biden was going to get walloped because voters just weren't willing to re-elect someone senile, while many Democrats were doing their best to convince themselves otherwise. It's somewhat fair to say, "oh, so all the model does is tell you things that are blindingly obvious?" Yes, with a significant caveat: seeing what's in front of your eyes is a very difficult thing in politics.
ThenElection
1mo ago
There's not a ton of money to be made if you believe the odds are 50/50. Prediction markets give Trump 60/40 odds, while Nate's model gives 50/50 odds. If your bankroll is $1M, then it's only rational to bet 167k, for an expected value of 40k. Not nothing, but not a ton of money either.
That also ignores other costs, like counterparty risk. Nate also has to deal with reputational risk: people might value his published models less if they thought he was making bets on markets that were influenced by his models. Since that's his main source of actual income, a bet would be substantially negative EV for him.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Trump has had two Presidential elections so far. Even with no bias, you'd expect the error to be the same sign 50% of the time.
ThenElection
1mo ago
The perspective of the policy maker would be more "black men are marginalized from traditional banking institutions and turn to alternative ones instead, so we should promise to protect the alternatives." They amount to the same thing, but the added layer of indirection lets you avoid consciously considering the concrete implications that you explicitly list.
ThenElection
1mo ago
https://biblehub.com/matthew/23-24.htm
Semicommon idiom. Jews have religious laws against bug eating, and so they were very fastidious about straining out bugs from drinking water. Jesus was contrasting this focus on very small things while letting a big thing (i.e. a hyperbolic camel) get through.
In this case, corporate money allowed by CU is the gnat, while federal spending is the camel.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Some rounding errors are positive, some are negative. So if you add them all together, in the limit the expected mean error is zero, so this program is effectively free!
ThenElection
1mo ago
"You're a black man, right? Vote for me, I'll give you government handouts and weed! You can even use the handout to front money to start dealing!"
ThenElection
1mo ago
That's probably a good idea. But black men who are into crypto presumably don't want regulation to "protect" them from it.
The issue with the ambiguity is that people really into crypto are as likely to fill in the blanks with things they're worried about as things they're hopeful about.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Protect cryptocurrency investments so Black men who make them know their money is safe.
...what? I'm sure men are more involved in crypto than women, but why black men?
And what does "protect cryptocurrency investments" even mean? Providing a price floor for them? Making them more regulated? How?
My bias is that crypto is speculative gambling for the mass public, though I believe there are valid use cases for it. What's next, subsidies for Amway to protect women-owned small businesses?
ThenElection
1mo ago
did NOT foresee it becoming a 3 v. 1 with the Moderators basically carrying Kamala over the line
Was this really not foreseeable? It was the only thing I would have given 90%+ certainty to.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Depends on how you count. E.g. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2022/12/07/china-may-have-surpassed-us-in-number-of-nuclear-warheads-on-icbms/
I'd take that guesstimation with a large grain of salt, but China likely has at least 100 nuclear ICBMs that could reach the USA. Supposing an 80% failure/interception rate, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Anti-ship missiles (and where they launch from) are targets every bit as much as ships are. China wouldn't sit idly by while Taiwan shot down all its ships, and it's likely their opening salvo would substantially degrade Taiwan's ability to launch missiles.
Embargo-wise, neither China nor Taiwan are going to be doing much commerce anyway in the event of a war, but they're both calorie self-sufficient. Energy is the trickier bit, but China produces more of its own energy and also has a couple hundred thousand barrels/day of overland capacity.
ThenElection
1mo ago
They don't even expect a war. They're playing positional chess, focusing on developing areas of influence. Each individual step will be a micro-escalation: too small for anyone to start a war over, and giving the PRC the space to deescalate if necessary without loss of face. Then, repeat.
At some point they'll need to start exchanging some major pieces, but if they position themselves appropriately beforehand, every exchange from then on will be to their benefit.
ThenElection
1mo ago
try to start a war via blockade
What's your take on the likelihood of a "soft blockade"/quarantine/enhanced customs inspections? How would Taiwan and allies respond?
Seems to me to be more in line with China's grey zone approaches so far, and it has more opportunities for escalation/de-escalation.
ThenElection
1mo ago
It's stretching the definition of Anglo probably well past its breaking point, but Singapore's defense procurement is widely held in good regard. And I think the British influence plays a role here: both Taiwan and the PRC are comparatively worse.
ThenElection
1mo ago
It's comparatively rare, e.g.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16054005/ (21 positives of 1014 reported drug facilitated sexual assaults)
That's not to say DFSA doesn't happen. It's just that nearly always, the drug in question is alcohol. And I'm sure you've seen sketchy dudes slipping vodka into a partying girl's shot glass.
As another note... This was pretty much impossible to Google. Every link you see come up is either people hyperventilating about the problem with no statistics about its prevalence, or statistics about how many people are sure they've been roofied or know someone who's been roofied.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Roll back the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley Act, including both the union protections and the union restrictions. They mostly served to consolidate union bureaucracies.
Particularly, allow minority and company unions. Still grant workers protections when it comes to organizing themselves, discussing wages, etc. Workers can strike when they want and do slowdowns when they want, employers can fire workers if they want, and unions and employers can voluntarily negotiate, but no one is compelled to come to the table (except insofar as being fired or production being disrupted makes them feel like they should come to the table).
Also, ban employer-associated defined benefit plans. They encourage negotiated terms that have costs far in the future, and individuals have shown themselves unable to be effective agents for organizations when that option presents itself.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I don't think the typical inefficiencies introduced by unions are literal violence. The issue is more that, when negotiations happen, the union bureaucracy inserts things that are more aligned with its continued and expanded power, and employers accept those things because they're cheaper in the short term than simply paying workers more or sharing some of the gains of automation with them. If it causes issues for the company/government a decade or more down the line, what does it matter? The individuals involved in the negotiation will be comfortably retired anyways.
ThenElection
1mo ago
If it's true that they're getting away with murder because of their race, I don't find some solace in the idea that my race is getting away with crimes.
If I were a white racist, I'd actually prefer if white murderers got punished more severely and with less stringent proof than black ones. In very broad strokes, whites are more likely to murder whites, and blacks are more likely to murder blacks. Killing off murderers of a particular race is of disproportionate benefit to that race.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Since this is a gossip thread...
I have a couple friends who genuinely want the extinction of the human race. Not in a mass murder sense as they conceptualize it, but in a create a successor species, give a good life to the remaining humans, maybe offer them the chance for brain uploads, sense. Details and red lines vary between them, but they'd broadly agree that this is a fair characterization of their goals and desires.
Where do they work? OAI, Anthropic, GDM.
I have a fair amount of sympathy for their viewpoints, but it's still genuinely shocking. It's as if you suddenly found out that every government official was secretly a Hare Krishna or part of the People's Temple, and then when you point it out, everyone thinks the accusation is too absurd to be real.
ThenElection
1mo ago
On balance, I think he likely did it. But Cole's specificity raises some skepticism of his testimony for me. Would a murderer actually mention those details?
Not impossible, and I don't have a strong mental model of jailhouse confessions and what motivates them. But I can equally see the police thinking "this guy obviously did it, so we should intentionally leak these details to Cole to make sure we get him."
ThenElection
1mo ago
A bunch (all?) of the cofounders have jumped shipped recently.
This photo says it all. Or, in other words, if you come at the king, you best not miss. After the coup/counter-coup attempt last year, gwern predicted Mira leaving this year at 75%. This is less jumping ship and more being fired/managed out.
Usually it would be the board who'd be the best positioned to fight against Sam's assumption of total power, but he's already packed it. My only question is how is this legal at all. Probably they've got o2 working on the case.
ThenElection
1mo ago
blacks seemed happier about their status in the 1990s than they do today
Did they? I wasn't watching the news back then, but Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson seem to have had a lot of racial grievances then, to the point of starting racial pogroms targeting Koreans and Jews.
ThenElection
2mo ago
These obviously had explosives physically implanted in them. If someone is reporting there were no explosives, they are either 1) an Israeli operative trying to propagandize to make Israelis seem more powerful than they are or 2) someone who can't identify explosives, or someone looking at pagers that weren't modified.
The real risk for supply chain attacks is spy software and backdoors: information is power. And yeah, any country where all its electronics are made or handled by a hostile foreign adversary should be worried.
I think my bigger fear is not that the technology can't work in principle--it can, although overstating the expected improvement is a real risk. It's that this particular company could well be a scam, and fraudulent companies could expect to survive well into the future with very limited negative feedback signal. There's little ability for consumers to accurately evaluate its efficacy, and you'll always be able to point out stories of screened embryos doing well.
Parents who go for this are going to be solidly above the average anyway, further skewing the results toward good outcomes even absent any real effects.
Another angle is that this is likely to get political very fast. There will be a lot of bad faith actors lodging criticisms at it, and that naturally creates an us-vs-them, circle the wagons mentality. That's something to be avoided at all costs.
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